AN INDIAN CARVED AND PIERCED MARBLE 'JALI' SCREEN 20TH CENTURY

拍品描述

AN INDIAN CARVED AND PIERCED MARBLE 'JALI' SCREEN, 20TH CENTURY Of rectangular form surmounted by an arched crest, carved and pierced from a single slab of white marble. The lower register is worked as a lattice of interlocking quatrefoil apertures set within a plain moulded frame, the geometric openwork executed with even spacing across the full width. Above, the crest rises to a broken pediment of scrolling acanthus, the leaves furling outward to volute terminals at either end and inward toward a central pierced medallion enclosing a stylised palmette or lotus bud. The reverse is finished but plainer, indicating the piece was intended to be viewed principally from one side. The edges retain traces of adhesive and mortar residue consistent with prior architectural setting. Now raised on a modern black metal display base. The composition combines two vocabularies that meet frequently in later North Indian marble work. The lattice below belongs to the long tradition of the jali, the pierced stone screen used in Mughal and post-Mughal architecture to admit light and air while preserving privacy, and to diffuse the harsh Indian sun into a filtered interior glow. The crest above draws instead on European Baroque and Neoclassical ornament, its scrolling acanthus and central palmette recalling the pedimented cresting of Italianate furniture and funerary monuments. This hybrid vocabulary is characteristic of decorative marble production in India under and after the Raj, when workshops in Agra, Jaipur and elsewhere adapted the inherited techniques of Mughal stonecarving to European forms and export tastes. Marble held a specific place in this tradition. The white marble of Makrana in Rajasthan, the stone of the Taj Mahal and of the great imperial tombs, remained the prestige material for architectural ornament and continued to be quarried and worked by hereditary craftsmen into the twentieth century. The technique of piercing a slab into an even lattice, cut cleanly from both faces so that each aperture reads as a crisp geometric figure, is one of the most demanding operations in Indian stonecraft, requiring the carver to work without margin for error across a brittle material. That the tradition survived into the modern period, applied here to a hybrid ornamental form, reflects the continuity of workshop practice long after the imperial patronage that first shaped it had passed. This screen exemplifies the persistence of Mughal jali carving into the twentieth-century decorative market, where the geometric lattice of the tomb and palace was reworked as an ornamental panel for domestic and export settings. The pairing of a strictly regular quatrefoil grid with a freely scrolling Western crest marks it as a piece of its moment: a late inheritor of an imperial tradition, adapted to a new visual language while retaining the technical discipline of the older workshops.

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